With the globalization of production and trade, counterfeiting of products has become a serious problem. One approach to fight counterfeiting is the use of technical countermeasures. For example, a common approach is equipping products with security features and using backend software for the verification of the security-equipped products, i.e., giving an answer to the question whether a product is genuine or counterfeit. This approach may be referred to as product authentication.
In one example, RFID tags may be used as an enabler for product authentication. For instance, the RFID tags may be attached to products and may enable the unique identification of products at an instance level. This means a RFID tag may be attached to each product instance (“item”) and the RFID tag may store specific data for the respective product instance or item.
Although the use of RFID tags has the potential to enable product authentication, one or more potential issues may have to be overcome in order for the use of RFID tags to reveal its full strength. One issue, for example, is RFID tag duplication. Tag duplication means reading data of one RFID tag and writing the same data to another RFID tag. In the context of counterfeiting, an adversary may read the RFID tag of a genuine item and write identical data to a RFID tag attached to a counterfeit item, with the intention of circumventing product authentication mechanisms. Consequently, solutions are needed to overcome this issue related to RFID tag duplication as well as other issues.